"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
His face brightened as with an immense relief.
"It is well," he said. "See that the head-clerk keeps good
account of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must
not be a cent missing. If there is," he added fiercely, after a
pause, "it must come out of the clerk's wages."
And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by
Carruthers and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American
consul's safe.
But the end came as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done
in the wild young days, and where we were once more--principally
on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida
Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli
Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the
sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck
to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the
thing capsized.
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